Silver as the Rainbow Scales

“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.

My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.

Incomprehensible, Big Thief

Happy birthday to me (from me).

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Where There Is No Death

What does the sentence “If you eat this fruit you will die” mean for Eve who is in a place where there is no death?

—Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva

Happy Halloween, I guess.

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Where Madness Lies

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness.
Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

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Three to The Third

Either a snail’s moist web of moonlight, or someone’s hot breath at four a.m. when the night has been too much, has eaten you whole.
This is my life.
It has been sifted through the bones of my body, through blood. It is all that I have.

—Joy Harjo

Happy birthday to me, from me.

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Spice and Scent

Like this alabaster box whose art
Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart,
Carven with delicate dreams and wrought
With many a subtle and exquisite thought.

Therein I treasure the spice and scent
Of rich and passionate memories blent
Like odours of cinnamon, sandal, and clove,
Of song and sorrow and life and love.

—Sarojini Naidu

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